Grow Up
by Alexia Eve
Summary: Dawn, aftereffects of "Seeing Red," vignette.


Grow Up  
  
  
She brushes her hair until it shines.  
  
Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred.  
  
Her mom used to brush her hair. It was longer then- like really long. Like LONG.  
  
It's still pretty long now. Buffy says things like "It looks good at this length" and "It's about the length mine was at your age." That's supposed to make things better.  
  
Funny how it doesn't.  
  
What she wants to say is that, when Buffy was her age, things were perfect.  
  
And she knows that she shouldn't. Their parents had just divorced. Buffy had just gotten kicked out of school. She was just adjusting to being the Slayer. She saw Merrick die. She felt responsible.  
  
She remembers the look on Buffy's face. She remembers seeing her, walking through the house like she was in shock. She WAS in shock. Mom and Dad hadn't believed her when she'd told them what happened. They told Buffy she was crazy. They hadn't seen Dawn, hiding at the top of the stairs, listening with wide eyes and wider ears as they fought over it. Buffy had stomped off and gone out somewhere- "I can take care of myself!" she had yelled- and her parents had fought. They had been screaming, so loudly Dawn couldn't hear herself think. And then she couldn't stay, and she ran into her room and covered herself with her blanket and wrote in her journal by flashlight until her hysterical sobs died down to sniffles.  
  
When Buffy came home, she had gotten undressed, and changed into pajamas with her back to her sister's bed- like she KNEW. She got into her pajamas and then sat in her own bed for a moment before turning to her sister's. "Another nightmare, Dawnie?" She'd hugged her for hours. She'd rocked her to sleep.  
  
Not that that really happened. Not the way Buffy remembered it. Buffy probably didn't even remember that fight, because it never would have started if she hadn't seen her big sister sneaking in and insisted she tell what happened at dinner.  
  
All her fault.  
  
She was too young to remember it, really. And Buffy never talked about it. She hated to talk about it, about any of it. Buffy was big about living in the now, in HER now.  
  
Buffy could do that. If she lived in Dawn's now, Buffy had died three times over.  
  
She places the brush on her nightstand and stares at herself in the mirror. Blondish-brownish hair- drab, plain, nothing like Buffy's. Buffy's hair was always perfect when she was Dawn's age. It was one of the things Xander had liked about her, he'd said.  
  
Dawn had had a crush on Xander once. But that faded when he was all over Anya. ANYA. Besides, Buffy had made it clear that no one her age would be interested in her little sister. Like everyone only tolerated Dawn because they liked her sister. Her sister saved the world.  
  
Her sister saves the world, and Dawn is still nothing because she was just a ball of energy lucky enough to maintain her form, and now she's just a girl who's supposed to smile while everyone around her dies.  
  
She finds a scrunchie to pull her hair out of her face eventually, and slowly begins to braid it in pigtais. It makes her look younger than she is.  
  
Today, she wants to look younger.  
  
Today, she wants somebody to pull her into a hug again and tell her everything's going to be okay.  
  
She understands that Buffy's been through a lot. She knows that her sister had so much more stress than she has. But Buffy had her mother. Buffy had her sister. Buffy had her friends. Buffy didn't have big gaping holes and the faint scars of knifeprints on her palm and lower forearm from when she needed to see if she was real or not.  
  
Even if she had, Buffy's would have faded. Buffy's scars always fade. Dawn's stay.  
  
Today, she wants somebody to hold her and tell her it's going to be okay. She wants somebody to wipe her mother's room clean. She wants to not remember seeing her mother's body at the morgue. She doesn't want to think about the splatter of blood that Willow kept trying to wash off for hours. She doesn't want to remember walking over and finding them back together, finally, and being happy and then coming back later  
and she's dead  
and she doesn't want to think about that anymore.  
  
Today, she wants to disappear.  
  
She picks up the eyeliner and slowly coats her lids, first upper then lower, and tries to make herself look more together. Willow's breaking down somewhere and Buffy was shot- she's okay, she's okay; sometimes Dawn has to remind herself- and Xander's trying to help both of them and she needs to stay strong for all of them.  
  
She doesn't want to be strong.  
  
Today, she wants to cry.  
  
She throws the makeup at the mirror and watches, not moving, as the black gunk slides down her cheeks. She doesn't react until it's all gone, in gentle twisting patterns across her face. When that's done, she buries her head in her hands, and cries until she can't choke out the tears anymore.  
  
There isn't a big sister to hug her. There isn't anyone to deal with her right now but herself.  
  
So she leans deeper into her arms and tries to muffle the hysterics escaping her throat.  
  
Dawn knows she has to grow up.  
  
But she doesn't want to quite yet.  
  
She isn't ready. 


End file.
